Welcome to class!

About Us

Carrie Wright

Assistant Scientist, Department of Biostatistics, JHSPH

PhD in Biomedical Sciences

Email: cwrigh60@jhu.edu

Website: carriewright11.github.io

Carrie's picture

About Us

Ava Hoffman

Research Associate, Department of Biostatistics, JHSPH

PhD in Ecology

Email: ava.hoffman@jhu.edu

Website: avahoffman.com

Ava's picture

About Us

Marta Karas

PhD Candidate, Department of Biostatistics, JHSPH

MS in Mathematics

Email: mkaras2@jhmi.edu

Website: martakarass.github.io

Marta's picture

What is R?

What is R?

Why R?

  • High level language designed for statistical computing

  • Powerful and flexible - especially for data wrangling and visualization

  • Free (open source)

  • Extensive add-on software (packages)

  • Strong community

R-Ladies - a non-profit civil society community (source: https://rladies-baltimore.github.io/)

Why not R?

  • Fairly steep learning curve

    • “Programming” oriented

    • Minimal interface

  • Little centralized support, relies on online community and package developers

  • Annoying to update

  • Slower, and more memory intensive, than the more traditional programming languages (C, Java, Perl, Python)

R hex stickers for packages

Introductions

What do you hope to get out of the class?

Why do you want to use R?

image of rocks with word hope painted on Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Course Website

Learning Objectives

  • Reading data into R
  • Recoding and manipulating data
  • Writing R functions and using add-on packages
  • Making exploratory plots
  • Understanding basic programming syntax
  • Performing basic statistical tests

Installing R

Collection of R packages

We have an R package called jhur that will make sure all the packages are installed.

You can just copy and paste the below code into your console - we’ll explain what it all means in the next day or two

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("muschellij2/jhur")

Note it may take ~5-10 minutes to run.

Useful (+Free) Resources